A recent rainbow

Who doesn’t love rainbows? This is one I snapped a couple of weeks ago when my friend Dassini was over for a visit.

The rainbow can be used to investigate how we impose our divisive concepts on the unbroken world of flow and change. The spectrum of colors in the rainbow is a continuum, and yet we find that the mind skips over the intermediate colors in order to see only red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

 But Xenophanes only described three colors, and saw the rainbow as "a cloud that is purple and red and yellow." Aristotle too saw the rainbow as three-colored, but in his case the colors were red, green, and purple, although he admitted that orange could sometimes be seen between red and green [Meteorologica III, 2. 371-372]. The tri-colored rainbow persisted for a long time in Europe, probably because of the correspondences that could be made between the three colors of the rainbow and the Holy Trinity. Milton, for example, described the rainbow as "Conspicuous with three listed [i.e. striped] colours."

 Sometimes four colors were described, and these could be correlated with the four elements. Newton originally described only five colors — red, yellow, green, blue and violet — and may have included orange and indigo in order to make a parallel with the musical scale. And there is evidence that when he did later describe the seven-colored rainbow, those colors did not correspond exactly to the modern red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet version we know today.

In fact, the notion of the seven-colored rainbow is vanishing; the idea of indigo being in the rainbow is now often dropped, and so we’re back to the six-colored rainbow (which I suppose could be correlated with the Six Elements). But when I look closely at high-resolution photographs of rainbows I find that I can, with only a little effort to overcome my habitual division of the rainbow into seven colors, convince myself that I can see a dozen or more distinct bands. Perhaps in the future we’ll evolve specific words for those colors and have a decimal or duodecimal rainbow.

A rainbow is a continuity of color rather than separate bands of distinct hues — which is why our cultural conditioning can affect how many colors we see. It’s that underlying unity and continuity that I’d like to highlight, since it seems to point to something very real about our own situation. We too are part of a continuity of phenomena. We are currents in the great cycles of the physical elements. We are woven into the fabric of nature.

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